Is it time to stop making excuses for things that are simply not acceptable?

I am by no means a bastion of good grammar or even good spelling for that matter, but luckily I am more than able to press F7 (Shortcut for Spell check in MS Office) however the news that BT recently had to reject ¼ of applications for an apprenticeship due to the applicants being practically illiterate send shivers down my spine for the future of this country.

Listening to James Whale’s Drive on LBC last night the consensus seemed to be that the fault is shared between the Teachers and Technology, the Teachers argument I can understand as after all they are paid to educate so a limited education must result in some blame being apportioned there. On this subject the only thing I would say is that before we get some burning torches to chase after the teachers for a good old fashioned witch hunt, there is no way that they alone can be responsible and until they are allowed to restore discipline and even more important are backed up by the Parents at home then there will be little they can do other than try and get the children through the day.

I may blog some more on this in a bit but for now I want to focus on the technology part, the argument goes something like this: Young People spend more time sending text messages, e-mails and tweets (Follow me @adamgbrown), these communication streams have limited size (Although I refute this with regards to e-mail.), therefore it is causing children to use txt spk (text speak) in formal communications. I find this theory preposterous, basically when I was growing up, and to this very day I have always used the greeting “Hi” I say Hi to my friends, I write Hi in my e-mails and text messages, and when I write a formal (or even semi formal) message I start it with “Good Morning/Afternoon” or perhaps “Dear Sir or Madam”. In all the years I have been writing and talking I have never, to my knowledge, had an issue with when to use formal language and when to use informal. Surely this is all part of our social interactions, something which we have been doing for millions of years.

Exactly why sending a few texts should excuse people of this basic building block of what is known as common sense is beyond me, however it is systematic of a larger scale problem facing the country, why are we so quick to provide excuses for what is simply not acceptable? The LTA (Lawn Tennis Association) spends as much money on supporting failed tennis stars as we do on supporting the ones who have a good chance of making it, in fact our two big Tennis hopes at the moment are Andy Murrey who left the UK to head to Spain to train and Laura Robinson who trained in Australia. So there is review after review as to why we can not have a British Wimbledon champion, and yet at no time is anyone willing to turn around and say “Sorry, you’re just not good enough.” We create a society where turning up and competing is good enough and then complain when our sportsmen do not show enough passion.

Now when this “Well at least you tried” attitude was simply affecting our sportspeople (I love sport as much as the next man, but it is unlikely to have too much of a negative effect on our country.) it was just a bit of an embarrassment, but now that it is effecting the next generations ability to function within our society surely this has to be the wake up call.